


The Blighted Heath

by nonphenomenaut



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alien AU, I don't have a clue, John is an alcoholic hermit who spends his days naked, Sherlock is an alien come to earth for sex, Sherlock is humanoid-ish, alien/human smut, alienlock, interspecial sex, just warning you bro, sex with aliens is weird, so John's at least got that going for him
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-23
Updated: 2016-09-18
Packaged: 2018-03-19 05:49:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3598707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonphenomenaut/pseuds/nonphenomenaut
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After being repatriated against his will from Afghanistan, John Watson returns to a life that's no longer there for him and finds a nice place to stop existing.</p><p>...until he gets a visitor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Half Killed

**Author's Note:**

> i'm hating on my other fic. I need a place to decompress...

His sister had been his estate agent. A hackneyed try at her fourth consecutive interest when she could never keep away from the booze long enough to make it a vocation. Before this it had been unsuccessfully running a sweets shop that had closed down six months after it'd opened. Two years after her marriage. Her wife's final gift before divorcing his sister had been paying off her debt and suggesting real estate instead. All the best, well wishes, I can't watch you disappear.

The Watsons were a family of master disappearances. They'd been doing it for years.

Harry had grabbed the idea with both hands shaking and swore up and down she had had her last drink and that she had reigns of her life on the turn around. Clara just needed to see. Take some time to calm down. She'd said all this while spreading out her folders across John's bed trolley, taking a seat beside his thighs and ducking beneath all his IVs.

"Somewhere new Harry." John'd said with sweat still prickled on his brow, still testing the complaints of his body in the automated bed. The bitter screams of his perforated shoulder that he could blame for the tears in his eyes. "Somewhere I don't know. I need to get out of London as fast as I can." Even though he'd just got here.

John's choices had not been made by his time in Afghanistan. Not his want to be alone. Not made because this had been his third (final) tour patching up the soldiers in the name of Queen and Country. Not made because of the stifling dry day where he'd stopped to laugh and a bullet had carved his body a new hole. Not made when he'd knocked his shooting glasses from his face in an attempt to find the source of the numbness and bring back blood on his fingertips. Not made when he found rough soft sand below him or the billowing purple sky above.

He chose this choice because he came home.  
And that had been what had been most unbearable.

He still remembers it, like some convoluted nightmare dream scape far worse than anything he'd yet seen. So devastating. Still high on hospital-grade pain killers and exhaustion when his wife of seven years came to see him for the first time since he'd been back. Still choking on a ventilator.

Her face was still the same round blade he'd grown accustomed to. Those small white hands that for patchwork years had been handing him tea and grasping his hand and encircling his cock. But that hurt to think about now.

It had been that large round belly unable to be hidden beneath her bright red coat and big blue eyes that had made it. 

She'd had the gall to bring it to him with a handful of resigned peonies. "John love. There's something important we need to talk about. I meant to tell you sooner...I thought you'd be gone longer...

"I've met someone, he's good for me. 

"His name is David.

"We're in love."

John had blinked and lost interest at some point in reopening his eyes again. She'd left sometime after with a soft kiss to his forehead that burned like a bullet never could.

And he chose then what was in his nature. Doing what they always had done. He turned away and disappeared.

The last prospective folder had been the one to keep his attention. The landscape paralleled how he looked (how he felt) scarred and isolated with its soft stone cliffs slowly eroding through time and weather. As if one day he might be able to look out his window and topple off the edge of the world. Fairly certain he'd let the ocean just take him.

The moon faced cottage in Essex County had been made for John Watson, formerly of the Fifth Northumberland Fuseliers, and he for it. With its darkly thatched roof and bright red door, letting ivy grow wanton across its salt beaten front, as if it too were trying to hide. 

"You sure Johnny?" Harry'd asked with identical eyes. "I just threw this in here to beef up my locations. To make me look like a /real/ real estate agent. Fuck's sake, I didn't think you'd actually like it! Arkham Village's four miles away and you don't even know how to drive! You won't be able to get there until they release you from hospital. Are you absolutely sure?"

John had insisted on it all the more and sent her away to begin the paperwork immediately. Making her buy it before someone else did. 

He'd also dismissed her so he could continue his much-needed rest after a particularly agonizing physiotherapy session had shaken him to his bones just that morning. He still felt the tremor rattling in his hand. Which seemed unfathomably to still as he placed it on the folder.

/Yes./ He told himself. /This is a good decision./

Sometime later, his physician had come round, knocked and entered. Looking at him with those bored eyes that always looked at him the same. Another body in a bed. Another paycheck on the way. 

"So, Dr. Watson. Any progress today?"

John had risen from his woolgathering calmly and surprised himself by managing a delicate smile. The first he'd ever felt on his face since the fine flushes of boyhood had assailed him. A long time before his first shaky cigarette after a bullet went whizzing by and puckered the mud-dried wall by his face. Before his wife stopped loving him.

When he spoke he knew that he was not answering her question; but his own in fact. 

An entirely different one indeed:

"Oh god yes."


	2. Chapter 2

It was built on a heath that bordered an orchard of trees no one had bothered to identify. Maybe fruit bearing, but who actually cared? Perhaps 'built' was the wrong sort of descriptor for this little imperfect cottage. It looked to be more discarded than anything. Dropped and left to the whims of the edge of the world.

In terms of location, this place was wonderful. The cottage itself, though, was abominable.

Gorse grew up through the floor, only because half the back wall is missing. There was gull shit in the sink and salt burn across the walls. What still stood gave the impression that the little place was disappearing. Gust by gust. Just like him.

"Jesus Johnny." Harry had gasped but hadn't drunk in so long her eyes had stayed dry.

He had just blinked blindly at the threadbare chair placed in the center of the sitting room, lit by a hazy shape of sunlight that wasn't meant to be indoors. The antimacassar placed impeccably at its center. The finely webbed threads burnt brown with time. Almost skeletal.

"I'll fix this. Just let me fix this!" She swore and he blinked some more and shifted on his cane as she flew out the door before sitting himself down in that worn sick chair and watched her go. She couldn't fix this with or without the shakes. But the door had stayed open and had left him the perfect view of his new burial ground.

This could be good.

This could be very, VERY good.

When she had come back, she was hauling a yellow caravan. It was bumped and dinged and the door stuck a bit on the hinges. But it had four complete walls and a roof that didn't give him a view of the sky.

It was small as fuck and she'd been able to pull it with her '95 Vauxhall Corsa and Jesus if it doesn't look like the prettiest little sunshine yellow coffin he ever could have ever asked for.

"Happy housewarming idiot." Harry crooned on her return in the doorway, grinning ear to ear.

John drops his jaw and shakes his head. "Harry. I can't accept this."

/There aren't suppose to be any witnesses./

"Oh bullshit Johnny, if you're going to insist on being a hobbit, you're going to have some company."

"'Hermit' idiot." John corrected. "Hobbits have friends." He rose despite himself and took up the snuffling thing. The white bulldog puppy with a mottling of brown mewled pathetically as he tucked it against his jumper. Its tiny needle milk teeth latching onto his finger with its tiny beady eyes getting lost in all its ridiculous folds of skin.

When Harry finally drove away waving out the window. Gladstone was biting at his ankles, managing to pierce a bit of skin. John tapped the floppy thing with his cane, which it took to biting instead. The wind flapped up and brought the ocean with it.

"Gladstone. Sit."

The bulldog dropped to its haunches immediately with an appreciative huff, its flews producing the same sound a bag would make being emptied quickly of air, before sliding further onto her belly and and then rolling onto her side.

Arkham was too far away to walk. But Harry had left a torn up mobile her ex-wife had given to her as a present. He called the number Harry'd left on the note for town and offered the grocery stock boy a hundred quid to bring him booze.

Lots and lots of booze.

He took to being naked for the hell of it. With no one around and only the ocean to court, it just felt natural. That, and drinking like a fish.

He would shove Gladstone from his crotch when she got too friendly and asked her if she was going to eat him when he died. They played with sticks from the yard in the morning. Against the crash of the sea. And drank himself into vicious oblivion at night.

He was completely passed out the first time the lights came to see him. Even Gladstone's barking didn't wake him.


	3. Chapter 3

Seventeen days into John Watson's self-appointed exile and there was a man in the water. Rudely floating face down.

"Shitfuckgoddamnedbloodybastard." He snarled as his hand scrabbled on a piece of loose weed and nearly tipped him off. He wasn't nearly as keen on descending the cliff side as he'd been when he'd first laid eyes on it. Somehow, the idea of dying versus the impending threat of it were two wholly different ideals.

Gladstone yipped unhelpfully from the top as he found a better hold.

The precipice at the edge of his property had a natural defense against gravity in the form of a crop of boulders. They told any wayward wanderer to wander no farther. And not to be outdone by nature, human hands had built a secondary edge of their own in the form of old oak fencing. Though it seemed more to make a point than to keep anyone safe.

John had been tilting his torso over the edge when he'd found it, delighted that his new home provided him a beach access. Of sorts.

It was really more of a precarious and dizzying sixty foot drop down to a waterlogged death should he ever lose his balance. The driftwood stairs had been set into the cliffside many years ago twisted with such inconsistency that the placement of each looked more like stitches holding the cliffside together than an actual path of travel. But it was access at least by definition.

He had made a solemn vow then until the end of his life to make it down there one day.

"Johnny." Harry had exasperated when they'd explored the property for the first time. Waving a hand at his moron proclamation the moment he'd found that strange whipstitch stairway. "You barely just got back to walking! You'll break your goddamn neck trying to get down that." Her tow hair had been tugged awry by the breeze.

/God willing./ He'd thought. But said instead, "I still want to try." He had given his cane a tap against the outside of his boot and leaned back.

"What? Breaking your neck?" Harry'd scoffed and knew. They were two of a kind after all. "You'd certainly fuck up my resale value doin' that."

It had been a surprise to them all when John'd finally been well enough to stand and then learned that he'd been too fucked up to accomplish it. MRIs and physical assessments had revealed no cause of the feebling musculature that was crippling him. No physical evidence. It was all invisible. Just like him. 

The ocean surged rhythmically against the bay beneath him. Eating away at the world. It was a miracle and a half he even made it down at all.

He came down hard on his legs. Ankle buckling. A sharp rock tore at his knee.

From far above there was a desperate yowl and he limped backwards until he could see Gladstone's wrinkled face peering over the cliff side. Her paws stamping at the precipice. He waved his hand and she only yowled harder. Her tiny sorrow brined by the sea.

The body in the water was long and pale and naked. Caught in a dark lay of seaweed. John went in up to his nipples. The surf trying its damndest to knock him down and he unwound the cold body from its colder lash.

Two fingers at the body's neck revealed no pulse whatsoever and John was half tempted to let the ocean take the body back away from here.

But then he turned it over in an effort to remember the dead.

And the man opened his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> five more fics in the pipeline. not to mention the three currently in progress.
> 
> writing for fun is a colossal mistake.


End file.
